Other Times, This is the Emotion
by C.E. Rowe
Summary: They live again and again, clawing back to each other from across the universe.


You don't get to remember your lives before: there's always something missing. A brother who's on the other side of the galaxy, not a Jedi and not important enough to leave a map behind. A lover who hasn't met you, who never will, who's carved himself into someone else's soulmate. A guardian who doesn't come for you when your parents are captured or killed, because in this life you're not his to keep.

Sure, there are flashes, moments of clarity that ignite and dissipate with equal brevity; but there is no willful recall, no fond memories of lightyears before to conjure by command. There are only surges that momentarily rise above the subconscious – a name, and explosion – then confusion, then nothing.

Sometimes, if you're lucky (or cursed) the past – the whole past – reels past you as you transition into another life, like stepping from shadow into light and back again. You smile or scream, and hope not to survive this newest introduction to death. (You remember the times you have lived, the times you have gone mad, with bitter vindication.)

"Time is not linear," you're told, "it's not even a circle. Time," they tell you, "is all at once."

Who did you hear this from again? What name did you have, then?

Sometimes, you meet reincarnations of yourself, face-to-face. A harbinger, a ghost, reaching across the universe, shocked you have the same favorite color, disappointed you haven't let go of those nasty habits. This is instinct, of course, a reaction in the spine rather than the brain. Neither of you remembers, but there is an affinity between the two of you that comes with the paradox of your collective soul inhabiting two beings at once.

On occasion, fate allows you to fall in love with yourself. This form of narcissism always ends badly: you can't hide from your reflection, and it devours you. At the beginning, you believe your mirror of flesh and blood is your other half, but by the end you know you've always been whole and you shatter the glass. It breaks you, too.

This is the only way to die of a broken heart. This is what tears galaxies in two.

Other times, you look into your child's eyes and see too much of yourself. You're afraid, but you can't articulate why.

This is the emotion Luke Skywalker feels when confronted with his daughter for the first time in what feels like decades. But an embarrassing mental tally of the slashes on his cave wall confirms it has been decades, two-and-a-half, to be exact. With a pang of regret, he wonders if she's been keeping count, too. Her eyes tell him she has.

When she presents Luke with his lightsaber, a tender whisper ghosts across Rey's mind: " _Your father would be proud of you_ ," it says. His eyes her her he is.

Other times, you're doomed to fight the same adversaries over and over again. Is it worth it when both of you always die? Is it worth it when, in some ways, you both live forever? It exhausts you to look into their eyes.

This is the emotion Ben Solo feels when he encounters Rey in the snow. For a moment, he sees her – or someone like her – staggering towards him on a broken bridge. A searing pain slices through his shoulder, though there is no wound, and the air is suffused with the smell of sulfur and the brine of the sea. A white light washes over him and he feels a sharp stab of betrayal. But the whiteness is only snow, only snow, and he's returned to the barren trees and inky twilight and insolent girl facing him with Luke Skywalker's lightsaber. He can hear his grandfather warning him not to choke on his aspirations. An annoying lineage of brunettes tells him he'll never win.

 _"Where have I heard that before?"_ sneers a voice that is and isn't his own.

Other times, it's the lovers who repeat themselves. You're met with the same hopelessness that you encounter with your enemies.

This is the emotion Finn feels when he watches a scavenger girl fend off attackers with her staff. For an instant, he's surrounded by an unfamiliar warzone, lowering his blaster as she deftly dispatches a group of Stormtroopers. Then he's back on desolate Jakku. _Star-struck_ is the word that comes to mind, but it doesn't sound quite right.

When she asks if he's a resistance fighter, he says yes, unable to rationalize why it fits so well, like Poe's jacket. They didn't teach him to lie.

" _I've been in this fight since I was six years old_ ," he's tempted to say, because it's true. But guilt pulls at him in the form of an echo that sounds a lot like Rey: " _You might as well be a Stormtrooper_ ". He chooses to fill the silence with other things.

 _Stardust_ , he thinks, finally, and this too inexplicably fits.

This is the emotion Rey feels when she wraps her arms around Finn on the Starkiller Base. She forgets for a moment and finds herself presented with a band of rebels led by a man wearing a jacket like Finn's.

" _I'm not used to people sticking around."_

 _"Welcome home."_

The heat of their embrace is chemical, radioactive, pressing down from without rather than bursting from within. She feels sand on her knees, sees an ocean swallowed by an explosion. After a moment of pain and light, they're back in the sterile hallway, and Han Solo is telling them to hug later.

Other times, this déjà vu lasts a lifetime. You're gifted, they say. A miracle, mumbling in languages you've never heard of in your sleep, mastering skills in minutes that take others years. Residue, vestiges, a sloppy clean-up job from the life before. Your slate is never clean. You search for purpose – there must be a purpose, for talents like yours. You're fulfilled when you finally find it.

This is the emotion Poe Dameron feels when he slides into the cockpit. "I can fly anything," he boasts to his rescuer. This is true, and it's been this way since childhood. Some say he's a natural, others claim it's in his blood. Poe says it's practice, and he's more right than he lets himself think.

A strange voice boomerangs back to him: " _I brought the message, I'm the pilot_ ". He attributes this to the adrenaline.

His gaze becomes unfocused, and prison bars surround him, though this isn't a jail cell he remembers. Tentacles slither around his temples.

" _One tends to lose one's mind_ ," rasps a disembodied voice.

Poe's eyes flutter open, ensconced in varying shades of darkness. Memories of the crash flood back to him, memories of Finn. He has the sense he owes several lifetimes to him, not just one. With a feeling of certainty that runs deeper than his usual bravado, he knows they'll meet again.


End file.
